FISK CAPS OFF CAREER AS HE LIVED IT--AS A REAL PRO

South Side, North Side, we miss baseball. There's no promise in these gray afternoons. Pitchers and catchers won't report to spring training for weeks. There's no magic.

For baseball fans, this is the worst time of the year.

And as it snowed on Monday, you could just feel all that sadness washing over the hearts of White Sox fans, and I suspect even Cubs fans too.

There are no newspaper stories about rookies who can throw 100 mile-an-hour fastballs. There are no reports about the speedy new kid outfielder, or the anecdote about the old veteran trying to hang on to another year of big league money.

I was parked in the car in front of the neighborhood hardware store when I heard it. This was a few years ago. For some reason, a classical music station was on. And the announcer, in the precise and modulated tones of an educated man, shocked the hell out of me:

"The following selection is being played for a Mr. Carlton Fisk."

That's right. An impromptu classical music request line was opened for the best catcher in White Sox history. And it was wonderful, the music, I mean.

You know Mr. Fisk, I'm sure. Or you know of him. A few days ago, he was elected by the baseball writers into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Since I've got a tin ear, I can't tell you what Fisk music was played back then. There were French horns in it though.

It was precise, almost a march, and so finely ordered that it must have appealed to the sense of the meticulous in Fisk, who was always prepared to play a thinking man's game.

"He was probably working on his orchids," said Joe Tybor, a friend who was a sportswriter years ago and wrote a few long pieces about Fisk and catchers in general. "He loves to work on orchids, you know."

I didn't know. But I imagined Carlton Fisk, with those big broken catcher's hands, working in the greenhouse at his home growing orchids, listening to the French horn on the radio.

Orchids are for gardeners who prepare, who are precise. Orchids are several steps up the evolutionary ladder. I'm still at the bottom, trying to grow broccoli.

Because television needs dramatic pictures, Fisk's story will always be reduced to that home run lean in the 1975 World Series, when he was with the Boston Red Sox.

It was a great moment, a photogenic moment, and so it is more dramatic than the shots from the center field camera, past the pitcher's shoulder, into Fisk's angry eyes staring back at a young pitcher.

Home run highlights are fine, but they don't tell the whole story of baseball--of young stubborn pitchers who were tamed and trained, like Jack McDowell and the rest of the fine White Sox pitching staff of the early 1990s. Fisk did that.

But perhaps more important than the home runs and all the games caught and the training of young pitchers was the idea that Fisk was a conservator of the game.

He wanted to preserve the integrity of the game--a word easily used by baseball owners and the marketeers, even as they shrink the strike zone and juice up the ball to get more home runs.

In one of the interviews he gave after being voted into the Hall, Fisk talked about how much protecting the game meant to him. "I gave everything I had to the game," Fisk said. "I feel very proud that I was a giver and not a taker."

So naturally, on the night of May 22, 1990, as the White Sox were playing the Yankees in Yankee Stadium, Fisk got angry.

It was the third inning. There was one out and a runner at third. "Neon" Deion Sanders--the football player who was then taking a multimillion dollar tour as an outfielder--hit a pop-up.

Sanders ran 20 feet, stopped and watched the infielder grab the ball for the out. Two innings later, Sanders stepped up to the plate to lead off. Fisk jawed at Sanders. Both benches cleared.

"I said run the bleeping ball out you piece of bleep," Fisk said a day later. "I said run the ball out. I made a point to make eye contact with him. Then he mumbled something. I said, `What did you say?' He said, `The days of slavery are over.' "

So Fisk really got angry.

"He wants to make it a racial issue. There's no racial issue involved. It's professional etiquette. I said there's a right way and a wrong way to play this game. It offended me."

Fisk was playing in his 2,172nd game. Sanders was in his 24th.

Now that he's going into the Hall, Fisk wants to be depicted wearing his Red Sox cap, not the White Sox, for his plaque there. He's paying back owner Jerry Reinsdorf for barring him from the White Sox clubhouse during the playoffs in 1993, after Fisk was let go.

A few angry fellow Sox fans said I should be upset that Boston was getting the credit.

But I can't. Carlton Fisk can wear whatever cap he wants to wear. He doesn't owe us. We owe him.

Just this once, let him be a little selfish and indulge a grudge. Why not? We got to watch him play.